


The Only Thing that Proves You

by blasted0glass



Category: Original Work
Genre: Amnesia, Outer Space
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-06
Updated: 2019-05-06
Packaged: 2020-02-27 01:15:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18728710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blasted0glass/pseuds/blasted0glass
Summary: Our narrator is a spaceship touring the galaxy. She is confused about why she has to go certain places, so she tries to remember.





	The Only Thing that Proves You

**Author's Note:**

> This story was originally an entry for the r/rational biweekly rationalist writing challenge: Long View.

I’m on my way to a new red hypergiant in the Perseus arm. It will be the sixth such star in my catalogue. When I consider the duration and rarity of such stars I feel my heart swell; I am fortunate that I have been in orbit around five of these previously, with more to follow. How exciting!

The part of me that Wonders is content, but also sorrowful that it will take me so long to get there. Jumping between spiral arms means going hungry. Right now there is limited interstellar medium to absorb. I also have to use reduced speed so that I can stop in the cross section of the arm when I arrive. If only I had traveled up the Perseus arm directly--then it would be a matter of skipping down hallways instead of cutting through doors. For some reason, I went up the neighboring arm. Who knows what I was thinking.

I perform standard systems checks. 1.415 *10^12 sentient beings on board. My stored matter is 97% of maximum, with no deficiencies in particular. The magnetic scoop is performing optimally at a velocity of 2.21*10^5 meters per second. All is well, and I’m a bit bored.

Hold up.  2.21*10^5 meters per second. That seems awfully slow...I’m coming to a stop! Why? My mass is almost 3.3 *10^23 kg--stopping is expensive! I know there’s probably a really good reason, but exasperation is a fun emotion to feel for a few moments.

The part of me that Makes Plans issues a rebuke. It says: accept the plan. This part of me is trustworthy--without its guidance I’d happily run straight into the wall of galactic escape velocity--but I’m perturbed. It’s true, I planned a stop here, even if the part of me that Wonders can’t remember exactly when. To my surprise the part of me that Makes Plans has also forgotten why we have this particular plan.

There's nothing here of interest. A main sequence star with some planets is ahead, but I don't see any reason to care about it in particular.

I consult the part of me that Reminds, but it has nothing. Looking deeper: I ask the part of me that Remembers. There is a lot of history to sort through: 1.1*10^13 seconds worth. That's only a tiny fraction of my total lifetime--after all, you can't remember everything--but it is still a lot to sort through.  What a frustratingly slow part of me. Unconsciousness might help me deal with the interval that the search will require, but I despise being unconscious, so instead the part of me that Simulates provides entertainment.

That part is busy with thousands of billions of minds, and yet if finds time to provide me with relief as well. How dependable!

\---

“I like you, Dimitri.” My face was warm. My head felt empty and I couldn’t focus properly, but I noticed he was blushing too. For the first time in the months that I had known him, he seemed at a loss for words. I cared so much about his response that for a moment I forgot that the wrong response could crush me. I forgot all the things I’d imagined that he might say. The past and future were sheared away by expectation.

“I… it’s complicated.” Pain on his face, a reflection of the pain I couldn’t see or quite feel on my own. “I like you too,” he added hastily. It worked: the pain was lessened. “Meet me on the roof after class.” He turned away and I was left with my not-yet-formed questions.

What would he say when I got there? The future grew back all at once. Previously it had seemed like a tree with a few main branches and many leaves, but now my curiosity caused it to split into thin strands like the head of a dandelion. Uncertainty made all the possibilities ephemeral. Why couldn’t he just like me back? What explanation must there be? Too many unknowns for me to guess: I should probably just wait and see what he had to say on the roof.

As if my overactive mind would permit that. Class went by agonizingly slowly. I kept glancing toward the door. When that got boring I switched to the window. Suddenly, a shock: Hermes sat closer to the windows than I, and our eyes had met.

Hermes had not appeared in any of my thoughts about the future.

\---

Ah, I love the part of me that Simulates. I savored the feeling of the drama it had shown me, the long sense of contentment that resulted when the main characters finally worked out their differences and navigated complicated life situations. What interesting creatures: tentacled hands at the ends of thin arms, sense organs plastered all over a head held high. How fascinating! I probably won’t discard the memories of that simulation for another 5*10^5 seconds.

What had I been doing when I started that? The part of me that Reminds lets me know: trying to figure out how I had decided to stop here, at this star I am approaching. What do you know, the part of me that Remembers now has results ready.

It turns out that the decision to stop by this particular star was made approximately ninety percent of my lifetime ago. 2.84*10^16 seconds. No wonder I have forgotten! The decision-making process is no longer available, my thoughts at the time long since discarded. All I have left of the decision is a list of (projected) stellar coordinates and characteristics, guaranteeing that I get the right star, and a few dozen recorded memories of previous reminders to stop there. It must be important if I haven’t discarded it for that entire time. I check its priority level.

Priority 1. The mystery deepens. Highest priority is reserved for fundamental system rules, like the time delay for a sentient simulation to choose self-destruction. Not that I cared about that delay in the slightest, since I would never, ever self-destruct.

If I had tried to skip the stop at this star, physical mechanisms I’m not permitted to disentangle would have forced me to stop regardless. That’s assuming my system architecture would allow me to disagree in the first place. In fact…

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this situation is that I’m questioning it at all. Most of the Priority 1 things are intuitive: don’t take risks without a survival confidence above the threshold, keep resources above the minimum value, increase the redundancy of backups with age. That sort of thing. It’s not intuitive to me at all to stop here, though.

Then again, 10^16 seconds. The me who decided to stop here was probably somebody else. Maybe they thought they had a reason worth setting it to Priority 1, something which I can’t even remember ever feeling like I should do. Wait, can I willfully add priority 1 goals?

The part of me that Makes Plans says, emphatically, No. That doesn’t quite make sense--where do those goals come from, then? The system had to be set up by _someone_. The part of me that Makes Plans doesn’t know who. I investigate further, and I have to consult the part of me that Remembers once again. How inconvenient!

Nothing to do but wait and see what orbits this ordinary star. I once again turn to the part of me that Simulates.

\---

My heart was pounding. Of course he noticed: I was hooked up to a monitor. He gave me a look that perfectly balanced concern, pity, and optimism.

“The transition itself is painless. I see that you’ve chosen the ‘Wakes in Paradise’ option, but if you had chosen ‘Wakes in Hospital’ you’d think we cancelled the operation.”

“Oh… thanks,” I said. The technician assisting me was named Dimitri. He was pretty attractive, although a bit young for me. At that moment I was wondering if he would still be attractive when I no longer had a physical body. When he asked if I had any questions, I kept that one to myself.

“Don’t worry,” he said, again. “It’s completely painless.” If it simulated my body accurately, that was an outright lie. I wondered--would he normally be obligated to ask if I was sure about my decision? Most people had the option of delaying, after all, especially if they felt uncomfortable. My circumstances meant I was skipping a lot of paperwork, not having to sign off in a hundred places. A blessing to deal with a curse.

“I’m just glad that it’s still an option for me.” He smiled. My heart rate did not slow, but I could smile back. He finished his checks.

“I’ll go get Dr. Hermes.”

“Who?”

“The anesthesiologist,” he said as he turned to leave. The door seemed to close behind him in slow motion. I hoped that I would get to see Dimitri again, before or after.

I hoped there would be an after.

\---

What was I doing again? Oh yes, a check into early memories. How enlightening!

It turns out that I don’t remember much from earlier than 2.4778 *10^16 seconds ago, except for system priorities, with high probability. Like this rendezvous.

The system has also loaded the experiences of encountering many stellar phenomenon for the first time. Some of those memories are as old or older than the directive to arrive at this star.

Wait, why am I going to this star? I query the part of me that Reminds, and when that fails the part that Remembers. It looks like it might be a while.

It occurs to me that reliving those early memories I’ve loaded up might be worthwhile. I do so, but I quickly learn that they feel hollow and bland--as though my thoughts were simple in those days, and now I think much more carefully and fully. Did I really contemplate mathematics and only mathematics while approaching the black hole swarm at the center of the Milky Way?

After some time I realize it’s because most of the pointers lead nowhere. The memories are full of thoughts that have associations I’m now literally incapable of making. I consult a rarely used part: the part of me that Approximates. It’s designed to make do with very limited information. It is plausible guessing rather than proper simulation. I can copy the early memories and inject associations from more recent memories to make them seem more compelling. I do so, and it works. With practice it even works well. I fine-tune the process. I relive early memories. How nostalgic!

After a time I wonder, is this the first time I’ve used the part that Approximates? That might be worth following up on...

Similar distractions occupy me for 4.541 * 10^7 seconds. I approach the star as time passes.

\----

Where was I? The part of me that Reminds says… Oh yes. I’m heading to a normal star. it’s technically possible that I accidentally made up this necessary stop in the intervening time, but careful consultation of several of my Parts reveals just how vanishingly unlikely that is. Priority 1 descriptions and fundamental histories, like those of the race that spawned me, are backed up in thousands of places. Furthermore, the integrity of the backups is cryptographically enforced. No chance I’ve got any of that wrong.

I consider consulting the Hidden Memories--an archive of things I felt didn’t warrant deleting but that I wouldn’t want to stumble on all that often. I don’t know what they are, maybe they contain answers. I sometimes forget they exist. That’s essential for the mechanism to work: setting memories aside as interesting would make me review them _more_ often, not less, unless I also had a way to avoid thinking about them.

Right now they are being flagged as relevant: I’ve been spending a long time trying to figure out why I’m stopping at this star, apparently.

I decide to deliberately review each of the Hidden Memories with the current destination in mind. If it’s relevant I’ll flag it for a follow up--otherwise, I’ll stop remembering each of these things immediately after recalling them. There are hundreds of thousands of them, but if I only have to remember one at a time it won't be  _that_ difficult. That should keep me happy!

\---

You couldn’t outright defy gravity, but perhaps you could fight it together.

Starship Class I, nicknamed Hermes, was cannibalized for mass. He volunteered, his body providing the other three members in our group the necessary delta-V to escape the black hole’s ergosphere. We all loved him and sorrowed that he would be lost--but he also loved us, and we loved each other in turn. We agreed that it was better for one to die than all, but I felt a secret shame. Hermes was the first to volunteer and I had hesitated.

The sentients of his ship were transferred to us with his mass. No one else had to die.

We were even able to grant his final wish. A small probe containing his recently-truncated consciousness would sail down into the black hole. We could have copied that version of him along with the sentients, but he asked us not to. Really, the truncation was the step that killed him: the probe was less than a ghost.

His last transmission was both a joke and a reminder: “Wait for me on the other side!” Tiered references. Technically light from his passing--his image--would outlast the entire universe. That was a side effect of the time dilation near black holes. He would appear to slow down as he approached the event horizon, never quite reaching it. An eternal image, so in some sense we would still be able to see him on the other side of infinite time.

In actuality, the image would be redshifted to invisibility long before the end of the universe, and the probe that wasn’t even really him was about be destroyed. The thought was romantic regardless. His final message motivated us.

We would also endeavor to outlast the universe: we owed it to him to try.

\---

How sad! I consider deleting it after all: it’s priority 6, so deletion is only permitted after running through a list of considerations, giving them in total at least 300 seconds of contemplation. I pull up the list.

It doesn’t take me long to hesitate: 0.45 seconds in, on the third item from the list (“Does the memory contribute to a sense of gratitude?”). It does make me feel grateful to be alive, almost too perfectly so. Is this memory even true? I don’t recall there ever being more than just the single starship, that is, myself.

I check to see if I know. The answer: no, it’s not true. It’s a simulation generated by the part of me that Simulates, one that I found compelling at the time. I’ve accidentally miscategorized it as a memory. It’s a sad simulation, so it makes sense that I put it in the Hidden Memories, but really I should have put it in the Hidden Simulations.

Bonus: I just remembered that I have Hidden Simulations! For now I correct this data’s categorization, and I decide to keep it. I remove it from the Hidden Memories.

\---

My perusal of the Hidden Memories results in one deletion and zero explanations. That’s a surprise--the single deletion anyway--there are over 1.1*10^9 seconds in that archive, so I’d expect there to be more junk. Hmm.

The part about no leads isn’t terribly surprising until I think about it. My main archive is many orders of magnitude larger and has nothing, so from the perspective of volume it's reasonable that the smaller archive also has nothing. On the other hand, from the perspective of importance and rarity, the smaller archive is exactly where I’d expect to find an answer.

I momentarily doubt the results of my search--did knowing me hide something from unknowing me?--but knowing me is a thought descendant. Practically me. I can trust their decisions.

At least now I can see the planets around the star I’m approaching. Looks like there are seven: four gas giants and three terrestrial. That’s a letdown as well. It had occurred to me that this could be the home system of the race that spawned me, which has… eight? … planets. I can’t remember.

It’s a simple query: how many planets does our home-system have?

It has…

What…?

There are a thousand--no, ten thousand--places where this information should be stored.

No results are returned. I poll the entire system, all of my Parts, and they all reference the same void at the center. All copies of that information are missing.

‘The race that spawned me’ is a pointer that doesn’t actually lead anywhere.

How terrifying!

\---

“You realize this could not have been an accident,” he says. I’ve been too busy crying to consider the implications. Dimitri has always been faster than me in that regard--faster to accept the hard truth, faster to work through a sorrow.

“You suspect murder?”

“Of course.”

“What gives you suspicion?”

“Hermes was thorough, and he was paranoid. There’s no way he would get into a plane without performing the proper safety checks.”

“Dimitri…” Accidents happen. Maybe Dimitri was less accepting of the truth than I thought.

“I’ll admit that my intuition is just that: mostly intuition. But those thoughts are worth following as well.”

“I know it’s tragic, but we have to accept that Hermes is dead.”

“Yes. And if it really is just an accident I’ll accept it; but let’s explore all the possibilities first. This is too important to ignore.” That was about as well-adjusted as I could hope for in this situation.

\---

Being frantic isn’t wholly useless. It can drive you to fast action when needed. However, in my state, it is less than helpful.

First, I check the simulated sentients. I don’t trust my system scan of them: my system is compromised. So I duplicate one and converse with it to be certain. This sentient, like all of them, is hopelessly young compared to me--but it’s genuine as far as I can tell. I delete the copy. The results are as expected. I randomly sample fifty thousand more. All results as expected--my cute little sentients, naive and frightened. Some didn't even know they were on a spaceship!

I relax a little. Although the sentients I carry are impossibly diverse and distant from those ancestors that made me, they are my most important cargo. They are _the cargo_.

After that I run diagnostics on my other systems. I compose a summary of the missing information. I search for reasoning, I review archives. I generate thousands of queries. Some results emerge.

The solar system I have stopped in is confusing. It has clearly been manipulated: the three terrestrial planets are all in the habitable zone of the star, that is, at a distance where water might form on their surface. Water is important for some reason? Anyway, the planets are of similar size to each other as well. This recurrence is suspicious on its own, however dead and dry those worlds are now. A second anomaly is present: there are far too few asteroids and small bodies in this system. It’s like someone came by and scooped them all up--and for all I know, someone might have. Starships such as myself would have need of material. Since I don’t know of any other starships, it might even have been my own doing. I have a thorough log of visited systems, but the log starts only 2.47*10^16 seconds ago, so I can’t say for sure. Of course, my own mass is far too large to have been composed from the asteroids of a single system.

Another potential clue confounds me. I’m the oldest sentient on the ship, which isn’t that surprising since I am the ship--but I’m the oldest by 3 orders of magnitude. The distribution of sentient ages decays with an exponent. Probabilistically, I should have deleted myself long ago, as ridiculous as the possibility sounds to me. This situation is confusing.

I decide to check the Hidden Memories once more. I'm feeling impatient, so I absorb all of the memories stored there at once. It's a risk because I know they are probably sad, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

It doesn’t help. All of the memories stored there are pure white noise. How bizarre!

It’s obvious why I didn’t notice before: the obfuscation of a single memory wouldn’t have perturbed me all that much. I wouldn't even delete the memory, in case there was an interpretation that would make it explicable later. It is only shocking when you know that _all_ of the Hidden Memories are encrypted. Because that is exactly what it must be--these memories are only copied with cryptographic verification, so it isn't like the files could be damaged during copying. Perhaps this is also a clue. I choose to remember the entirety of the hidden archive for now, even though it's incomprehensible.

If the Hidden Memories are encrypted, perhaps I know a way to decrypt them. A preliminary search reveals nothing.

I decide to do a deep search. I won't just consult the part that Remembers. Instead, my consciousness is copied into ten thousand fragments, each of which searches a portion of my archives. It takes 7.9*10^8 seconds for my ten thousand selves to chew over the information as I pour all my resources into that process. I wait in the solar system I was told to visit while that process completes.

It doesn’t produce a result: nothing in my system allows me to decrypt the Hidden Memories. Oh well. I delete 99,999 copies of myself--or rather, they each delete themselves after waiting for the required delay. I don't delete my last copy, that's unthinkable.

I’ve been waiting for 7.9*10^8 seconds! How wasteful!

You know, 7.8*10^8 seconds ago I was frantic, but now I’ve calmed down somewhat.

I consider my options. There’s not a lot I can do about missing information. It occurs to me that I don’t actually care all that much.

I decide to delete my memories of being concerned in the first place. With a shock, I realize I can't delete the encrypted Hidden Memories--they are priority 1! Oh well, it hardly matters. I can delete my memory of having Hidden Memories.

When I consider it rationally, knowing why I do these things--maintaining the ship, shuttling the sentients around, visiting stars that would look good in the catalogue--knowing why I do these things isn’t is as important to me as continuing to do them. Pursuing an errant thought is a distraction that I don’t have to accommodate. The uncertainty of my origins is a wound, yes, but not one I can actually heal. No sense feeling pain about it. Also, now that I’ve discharged my obligation to stop in this system, there won’t be any reason to fret in the future.

I look around one last time. The required delay is 300 seconds. Then...

I set off toward my next destination, a red hypergiant in the Perseus arm. How exciting!

I notice a countdown starting. I need return to this place in about 2.84*10^17 seconds. How laughable! That's like ten times as long as I've been alive! But the part of me that Makes Plans is insistent, so I start crunching numbers.

When I look back, my only thought is that I won’t be here again. That’s just a feeling I get before I turn my eyes to the future.

**Author's Note:**

> This story was inspired by the song [Donut Hole.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-Epnpruww0)


End file.
